With martial music, before them rode in his train, sixteen bands of nobles, twelve in each band, all dressed alike in black velvet and silver, and every man carrying in his right hand a lighted wax taper, whilst he restrained his prancing steed with the left. Last of all the bands came those of Olivares and the King, dressed like the others, but with some richer ornaments; and then great triumphal cars of strange and showy designs, made by Cosme Lotti, the clever Florentine. Each of them was 30 feet long and 46 feet high, lit with 100 torches, and contained innumerable figures and devices; and bands of music, the weight being so great that twenty-four bullocks were needed to draw each one, the bullocks themselves being hung with crimson, and accompanied by men in the garb of Orientals bearing silver torches. After them followed forty savages, whose clubs were torches; and as the great procession entered the enclosed space, and each party passed before Queen Isabel in the royal box, a fanfare sounded and the men saluted the sovereign; the whole procession, after having completed the circle, forming up in front of the royal box, whilst the mummers on the cars represented before the Queen ‘a colloquy of peace and war.’
Philip’s band of nobles in their musical ride and intricate evolutions, of course excelled all others; and the King, acclaimed as the champion cavalier of his realm, ascended to his wife’s box to lay at her feet the guerdon of his prowess, and witness the rest of the feast at her side. For ten days thereafter the feasting and vain show went on, comedies, concerts, banquets, balls, water fetes on the lake, illumination of the woods, bull fights by torchlight, a poetical contest and greasy poles; a cotillon in which the party pelted each other with eggshells full of perfume, and a hundred other devices to waste time and money,[224] and to beguile Philip from the looming affairs of State, now wholly managed by the strong, dark-faced man with the big head and bowed shoulders, whom most people hated for his imperiousness and his greed, the King’s bogey as some called him, the second King of Spain, the Count Duke of Olivares.
The brilliant hopes of peace and retrenchment which had greeted Philip’s accession had all been falsified. The Catholic union with France represented by the marriages of Philip with Isabel and of Louis XIII. with the Infanta Anna, had failed before the marriages themselves were complete; for the ambitious projects of Philip II. were again being revived by Olivares, who dreamed once more that Spain, cast down in the dust as she was, might yet hold the hegemony over the powers of Europe, and dictate to Christendom the articles of its faith. It was a vain, foolish, vision in the circumstances, for not of material strength alone had Spain been stripped, but of the real secret of its short predominance, the firm conviction of divine selection and of the invincibility of its sacred cause. The country was as politically heterogeneous as ever, whilst it had lost the homogeneity it had borrowed from religious exaltation; and yet, with its rival, France, growing daily in national solidarity and contributive capability under Richelieu, Spain was hurried by Olivares into a perfect fever for conquest, and to the arrogant reassertion of its old exploded claims.